


Lessons to Learn

by Rhinozilla



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Gen, between season 3 and season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 12:28:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7892323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinozilla/pseuds/Rhinozilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The children from Woodbury are acclimating to life at the prison but not fast enough. After witnessing the arena fights in Woodbury, trivializing the dangers of walkers, something like this was bound to happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lessons to Learn

The prison smelled like dirt, death, and stale air, and it was gray: gray walls, gray floors, gray everything; it was a far cry from the breezy, colorful streets of Woodbury. The adjustment period between the merging groups was taking its toll on everybody. For all the people crammed into one cellblock, it was uncomfortably quiet most of the time.

As soon as the adults patched up the outer fence and cleared the yard of the staggering corpses, the kids had jumped at the opportunity to spend time outside instead of holed up in the smelly, dank prison.

“Why do you burn them?” the squad of children’s more curious member asked.

Daryl was one that they saw the most out in the yard, moving bodies and burning them in piles. He didn’t seem to like the cramped quarters inside the prison any more than they did.

“To get rid of the smell.”

“Shouldn’t you bury them?” the same child asked.

“Takes too long. Too many bodies,” the man grumbled, dumping another wheelbarrow of bodies and body parts onto the stagnant pile.

The other kids were torn between their own curiosity and the offputting stench of the corpses, but the overly curious one, Kyle, prodded on.

“But you buried Andrea.”

The man didn’t make eye contact, too immersed in the task at hand. “That’s different. We knew her. She deserved a burial.”

“But the biters used to be people too,” Kyle pressed innocently.

“Ain’t people no more.”

“They still look like people.”

“Would you just—g’on,” Daryl shooed them with an absent hand. “Go pester somebody else.”

“Did you bury Merle?” a second child, a little girl named Jenny, asked.

Daryl glared at the little girl briefly before letting out a huff and uncorking the jug of gasoline. “Yeah.”

“Was he a biter?” Kyle pressed.

“He died. We buried him.”

“What about—“

Daryl straightened abruptly and tossed a lit match on the pile of bodies. “Get,” he barked impatiently at them, throwing an arm toward the prison.

The little squad of kids scattered as the fire spread through the pile of bodies. Kyle and Jenny, the least skittish of the squad, inched closer once Daryl moved on to start another pile several yards away. The bodies were ripe and soggy with morning dew, so it took a while for the flames to catch on.

“What crawled up his butt?” Kyle muttered sourly.

“Merle was his brother, stupid.” Jenny scolded. “And I heard that he WAS a biter and he put him down.”

“Why?” Kyle asked as they watched the bodies burn.

“Because he tried to, I don’t know, BITE him?” Jenny sassed.

“He didn’t HAVE to do that though. Wasn’t Milton trying to find a way to cure them?”

“This ain’t the flu, Kyle. They’re dead.”

“Yeah, NOW, ‘cuz they’re on fire.”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “You’re an idiot.”

One of the bodies that hadn’t been eaten by the fire moved at the edge of the pyre. Jenny jumped back a step, and Kyle looked at her smugly.

“Chicken.”

Jenny huffed, “It’s still moving. Musta not put it down the right way.” She started to walk away.

“Hey, where you goin’?” Kyle asked, keeping an eye on the shifting walker.

“To get somebody to kill it,” Jenny snapped.

“It’s stuck under the other bodies. It ain’t goin’ anywhere,” Kyle shrugged. “It’s gonna be burned up soon like the others anyway.”

“Ugh, that’s gross.” Jenny folded her arms, glancing over to where Daryl was dumping gasoline on the fourth pile of bodies.

Kyle smirked. “Bock, bock, chicken!”

“Shut up.”

“Little baby, scared of the harmless walker!”

“Kyle, shut up! Those things kill people.”

“Pfft,” Kyle plucked up a rock from the ground at his feet. “Yeah, and Merle and the others used to kill them all the time.”

They both remembered the arena fights, watching Merle and Martinez wipe the floor with those ugly freaks. The biters had just bumbled around in their chains like drooling morons. Watching Merle and Martinez destroy them had been funny. Kyle wondered if they would keep doing the arena fights here at the prison. The leader guy, Rick, didn’t seem as funloving as the Governor had been. Then again, the Governor hadn’t been as funloving at the end as he had been before the town got attacked.

“Why are we here?” Kyle threw the rock at the walker, watching in satisfaction as it bounced off a shoulder.

The biter snarled and wriggled under the other bodies, but it was wedged in tight.

“Woodbury was better than this place,” he went on, picking up another rock. “Why couldn’t those people have come there?”

“It’s safer here. And you heard what happened with the Governor. It wasn’t a good place.”

“Yeah, who told you that? Carl? He’s weird.”

“You’re weird, and stop that!” Jenny snapped.

Kyle pulled a face at her and stepped closer to the struggling walker. “Oh no!” he crooned in a mocking tone. “It can’t reach me. Look.”

He waved a hand within a foot of the walker’s reach. Struggle and snarl as it might, the biter couldn’t reach him. Jenny paled at that, backing away and shaking her head.

“Quit it, Kyle. It’s gonna get you! I’ll tell somebody.”

“Chicken!” Kyle wiggled his hand closer to the walker, looking away from the snapping jaws to smile smugly at Jenny. “I bet I can touch it.”

“Don’t!”

Kyle inched closer and reached out quickly, bopping two fingers on the top of the biter’s scalp before hopping back a step. The walker snarled more fiercely, wrestling with its entrapment.

“Would you stop?!”

“Try it!”

“No!”

“Look, it’s not hard—“ Kyle hopped closer again, reaching out and touching the walker’s forehead again. “See?” He looked over to Jenny.

The corpses, weakened from the burn of the fire, shifted as they fell apart, and the active biter suddenly found itself free. It lurched forward with a growl, and Jenny exhaled so hard in horror that she couldn’t immediately scream. Kyle only made a half turn before the walker’s hands were on him, pulling him to the ground.

He cried out, and rotting jaws clamped over his outstretched hand. Then he screamed.

“HELP!” Jenny was crying out then. “HELP! HEY! SOMEBODY!”

The woman, Michonne, was immediately running toward them with her sword out.

“Get back!” Daryl bounded back into view, shoving Jenny away with one arm while kicking the walker with one foot.

The walker gurgled as it was dislodged, and bright red spurts of blood dampened the ground around Kyle’s hand, soaking his sleeve as his thumb and index finger fell away from his hand with the walker’s jaw.

Kyle saw his fingers fall off, saw the blood pour from the stumps, and his screaming intensified, cutting across the air in the yard. Michonne put her sword through the walker’s skull, ending it properly this time, and Daryl took one look at Kyle’s hand, scooped the boy up in both arms, and hauled ass toward the prison, screaming for Hershel.

..:–X–:..

The amputation took Kyle’s entire hand as a precautionary measure. With no anesthesia or pain killers, the screaming echoed throughout the cellblock before falling silent as the boy mercifully passed out. Daryl had to hold the kid down, since he was the closest set of hands that Hershel had grabbed to help him.

He had eventually slumped out of the cellblock, elbow deep in blood, and was given a wide berth as he went to the shower room to clean up. Carol had drifted by once, and he hadn’t stopped throwing up, so she let him be and went to find Jenny.

The girl was hugging her knees to her chest in an empty cell. She was pale was chalk and trembling slightly from the trauma. Neither child had their parents. The world had taken them. Carol made her way over to the girl and quietly sank down to sit next to her on the cold floor.

“Two hours and no fever,” she announced. “That’s a good sign, but there’s still a ways to go.”

Jenny stared at the floor, rubbing her thumbs over each other, not taking them for granted suddenly. Carol sat with her for several minutes, patiently.

“If he dies,” the girl murmured finally, “he’ll turn into one of those things? And somebody will have to—“

Carol grimaced, “If is a big word nowadays.”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Jenny was suddenly angry. “I thought we were supposed to be better and stronger and smarter than the biters—“

She thought of the arena, the crowd and the fighters laughing as they wailed on the biters, dominating the weak corpses and pummeling them like they were nothing.

“They’re dangerous. They’ve always been dangerous,” Carol remarked softly. “What were you two doing?”

“He was…was tryin’ to…to see how close he could get…It was stuck. It couldn’t move. But I guess it got free somehow and—“ Jenny’s eyes welled with fresh tears and she dropped her face against her knees.

Karen stepped into the doorway, and she and Carol met eyes. Karen knew Jenny better and longer than Carol had. The other woman moved into the cell and relieved Carol; her expression was attempting to convey a message to Carol that Carol couldn’t quite read. However, Karen was making it clear that Carol should be elsewhere, so she stood and let Karen take her place.

Carol left the cell as Karen consoled Jenny, her thoughts swirling as she walked through the cellblock, making her way to where Daryl had gone. Mrs. McLeod had told her about the events in Woodbury, designed to numb the fear of walkers and liberate the survivors. Now children were taunting walkers with rocks and poking it with their fingers…That had to be stopped.

She found Daryl outside, sitting alone in the shade of the cellblock wall. Glenn and Maggie had taken over burning the bodies in the field, and he appeared to be idly watching them. He gave her a half glance as she approached but said nothing as she sank down next to him. He didn’t look well, but at least the blood on his arms had been wiped away.

“He alive?”

“Yes.”

When she didn’t elaborate, he ducked his head in a terse nod before pointing toward the gates.

“Gonna need a more permanent gate over there. Couple’a crooked fences ain’t gonna hold much back if more than a dozen push at it.”

He was deflecting, and Carol decided to go with it.

“Maybe something heavier. There’s plenty of wrought iron around here,” she offered.

He bobbed his head, “Once we get the field cleared for good, we can rig up some pulleys so we won’t have to lift and drag the gates open every time we—“

The muted but familiar thunder of a single gunshot reverberated out of the prison. Carol twitched, but Daryl went rigid, and Carol found her hand involuntarily grabbing his elbow. As soon as she realized this, she withdrew her hand and exhaled slowly.

Daryl snapped out of his paralysis and punched the edge of a fist against the wall on his other side.

“Shit,” he hissed.

Carol slowly pulled her knees to her chest, remaining where she was as Daryl popped up to his feet, pacing twice in a short burst of anger.

“Stupid…” he snarled under his breath.

One child. One bite. One gunshot.

They would need one more grave.

She felt sick.

“Carol.” Daryl’s voice was abruptly softer and less harsh.

Carol exhaled and climbed to her feet. That was it then. The dirt on Andrea’s grave hadn’t even settled yet, and they were already going to be digging another. When would it stop? She made brief eye contact with Daryl as she stood, dusting herself off. He looked concerned; his own anger and pain had fizzled out at the sight of hers.

“I’m taking a shovel,” she said plainly. “He’ll need a grave.”

“I’ll do that,” he offered.

“No,” she shook her head. “I’ve got it.”

She walked away, and he didn’t pursue her. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to or not. She found a shovel in the silver truck and made her way to the growing cemetery.

This had to stop. Someone had to teach these children that walkers were dangerous. They couldn’t keep falling prey to their own innocence in this world. They had to learn. Someone had to teach them how to survive.

Maybe Carol had learned enough from her own experiences to do that.

Someone had to.

After she dug this grave.


End file.
